Friday, April 15, 2011

Space

I haven't blogged for a long while, mainly due to the fact I've been coming to grips with a new job. But that doesn't mean nothing has been happening.

Work on The Way of The Kresh Book Two continues. It's slow and methodical progress and I'm finding myself in a very fortunate place. Knowing where the story is ending up, I'm letting the characters and situations lead me at present and finding some suprises along the path to my ultimate goal. It's a really nice, no pressure, creative space to be in and I feel privileged to be here. This is where the real creativity occurs, before the painful rewrites and backtracks and the inevitable scrabble to get published.

Meanwhile over at the coeur de lion site, I've just announced the author line up for Anywhere But Earth. So I'm beginning the editing process now. I'm doing this onscreen and trying out a few new features that Word 2007 has to offer. Hopefully it will be painless for me and the authors.

Episode 29 of the TISF podcast has also just debuted, with Chuck McKenzie doing a great reading of 'Like a Bug Underfoot', though if you don't like swear words you may want to give this one a miss. I've decided to hang up the podcast mic after Episode 30. That's two and a half years of programs and I find I'm a bit 'been there done that' about the whole thing. It's a lot of work and I'm at a place now where I've mastered the skill of podcasting and it's not new and fun anymore. This is why I gave up editing Aurealis Magazine too. I think two to three years is my maximum attention span for a project. Hopefully, however, with TISF I've left something that will stand as an archive of the voices of today's Australian speculative fiction community. That's a good feeling.

Mailing List Pop-Up

SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks